We're All in Romney's Great Adventure Together Now

Some of us just have to make the trip in steerage. Except maybe Ron Paul, but then even him.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — The country's course through the presidential election of 2012 was decidedly set on Tuesday night. It will be a test of the country's will. It will be a test of the country's pride. It will be a test not only of the country's guts, but also of the country's capacity to stomach another eight months of preposterous public shamelessness. There is no longer any plausible scenario by which Willard Romney, the Piltdown Man of American politics, will not be the Republican nominee for president of the United States. Which means, among other things, we have nearly a flat year of Willard's defending his lucrative career as a vulture capitalist and looter of old people's pensions on the ground that he is a classic American up-from-the-bootstraps success story, and that he is only in this to make sure that other children like him have the opportunity to be born into wealth and make themselves wealthier. The way he's going — and his staggering recitation of tinpot Reaganite banality after his win here was only the most recent indication of where he's headed — by the middle of, oh, April, we are going to hear about how Willard was raised a poor black child.

President Obama, Willard told his crowd, is practicing "the bitter politics of envy." He warned them not to be seduced by the president's "resentment of success." It was a moment of almost transcendental meanness and fakery. Willard was explaining to his audience that he was just like them, and that they were the keepers of America's promise, and that they would continue to be — at least until, for his own profit and that of his wealthy investors, Willard wrecked their companies, stole their retirement, and shipped their jobs to China, never to return. They were all in it together, Willard assured them.

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It is an altogether appalling spiel. The old, iron millionnaires knew how to talk to the proles. They built libraries while they busted the unions. They planted trees and developed parkland while they bought the legislatures and sublet the courts. And out of all of that we got cars and planes and television sets and an ambitious middle class that demanded political power and succeeded in wresting it away. Now, we have a class of plutocrats who create nothing, but who move wealth around, and they are demanding a return to the days of unaccountable corporate royalism. Willard's entire campaign is based on the notion that we are all in that effort together, even the people who are most likely to get ground up in it. A wink and a nod, and most of us become beggars to our own demise. It used to be that the corporate powers behind modern conservatism had to use misdirection to fool people into voting against their own economic interests. Willard doesn't want to work that hard. Instead, he's going to assert repeatedly that his interests and ours are the very same — that we're all in this great American adventure together. Some of us just have to make the trip in steerage, that's all. Sorry, sport.

But he's going to be the nominee, so on we go. The conservative "base," at least its social-issues element, has shown itself to be a spent force. They have squabbled among themselves, failed to coalesce around an alternative to Romney, truckled to him at the expense of each other in the pivotal debate last Saturday night, and now go into the sweetest of their sweet spots in South Carolina so hopelessly divided that, at this point, they probably couldn't agree on Jesus as their favorite personal Lord and Savior. The Tea Party, which was supposed to supplant the religious right in political energy and power, is just as split and, therefore, just as neutered. Their corporate leaders want a winner, and they want one now, and they don't particularly care what the folks in the tricorns with the Gadsden flags think about the former governor of the People's Republic of Gay Marriage and Socialized Medicine.

Which leaves us with the fascinating question of Dr. Ron Paul. He finished a decent second last night, crushing the campaign of Jon Huntsman. He is in an odd place. He is not a contender for the nomination in any real sense. However, he can continue to move through the cycle, not seeking conventional success, but piling up delegates pledged only to him. (If the rumors around Manchester on Tuesday night are true, and Paul's campaign has managed to raise $10 million over the past few days, then he can go on forever. That amount of money to his campaign is $100 million to a more conventional one.) This will give him a center of personal power with which Willard, and the rest of the party, will have to find some way to cope. Paul has stubbornly — and shrewdly — refused to state categorically that he will not bolt the party in the general election. He can string the whole business along, talking in his giddy survivalist code about "fiat money," and nobody will be in any position to take him on. He is going to stay on his own hook; in 2008, across the river in Minneapolis, Paul set up his own convention in opposition to the Republican National Convention. He can do whatever mischief he wants from now until the end of the summer, and nobody's in any position to make him stop. That is the only story left, save for the epic Horatio Alger saga of Willard Romney, Boy of the Streets, proud American, and proof positive that, in this great country, any son of an auto millionnaire and former governor of Michigan can grow up almost to be president.